A Notable Welsh Sound

The Introduction to the Longman
Pronunciation Dictionary by Professor J. C. Wells of
University
College London contains (second edition 2000 p. xxi) the remark that
"People living in Wales, whether or not they can speak Welsh, can often
(first edition 1990 "usually") pronounce the ɬ [the ll-sound]
appropriate for many
Welsh names". I find that I can only partly agree
with this. I should say rather
that the Welsh ll-sound
is
something that not one non-Welsh-speaker in 10,000 can produce in
exactly the authentic manner of the native Welsh-speaker. It's a
shibboleth that gives them away even if the non-native Welsh speaker
has only a single syllable to utter.

This is because, although very many of
these
English-native-speaking people of Wales are able to begin a syllable
with what is more or less the Welsh sound
(what
is known to
phoneticians as a voiceless lateral fricative)
hardly any of them ever
does so without "contaminating" it with an immediately following
ordinary English l-sound
(a
voiced lateral approximant) which they are no doubt quite unconscious
of inserting. Thus in aiming at the simple Welsh ɬ they are producing a
succession of two sounds [ɬl]which was quite probably what speakers in
Anglo-Saxon times usually produced at the beginnings of words like Old
English hlaf
which later
simplified its beginning to our present
simple /l/ in arriving at our modern pronunciation of the word loaf. A parallel
process to that
was no doubt the way OE hwæt
developed (perhaps via the voiceless w that many Scots people still use
who make a natural distinction between w- and wh- words) into
modern simple /w/
in what.
Of course, the native English speakers
of Wales, who constitute more
than three quarters of the population of their country, will rarely be
heard to rhyme Llangollen
with pollen
or Llanelli
with belly.
They generally distinguish
the double l's
from the
single ones in most Welsh words. Though this is not always the case
when the ll
begins the weak
first syllable of a word, as in items like Llewelyn and Llantrisant where
it might
sometimes sound over careful.

However, there are certain
time-honoured anglicisations that only
the ignorant or the pedantic or the aggressively
Welsh-language-revivalist speaker would avoid. There is, however, even
for the ordinary, reasonably well-informed, unpedantic and tolerant
speaker with no political axe to grind a real dilemma about how to
treat certain words containing the ll
spelling. The word least likely to cause any
problem is no doubt the name Lloyd.
This has to be admitted,
even though it is derived from the Welsh word for grey, to be a
distinct name from
the more obviously Welsh though very much less common name Llwyd. Perhaps many
people don't
even think of it as Welsh any more than they do the (originally
Spanish) word llama.

Also hardly in dispute are Lampeter
and eg (in the Cardiff area) Lisvane
at least when they haven't undergone orthographical re-Celticisation.
To refer to them as Llanbedr
or Llysfaen
may well be to
court misunderstanding because there are other places with such names.

Possibly Landore
(near
Swansea) and Leckwith (near
Cardiff) belong with them but their origins are open to question. The
suggestion of an original form Llechwedd
for Leckwith
wasn't favoured
by Gwynedd O. Pierce in his investigation of it in The Place-Names of the Dinas
Powys Hundred
(University of Wales Press 1968).

Llandough,
as the name of
a Dinas Powys parish immediately to the south of Leckwith and
pronounced locally
"Landock", is another interesting case. It and Llandow and Llysworney (both
just west of
Cowbridge), Llantwit
Major
(but not Llantwit Fardre),
Llanishen
and Llandaff
are the only half dozen
places beginning with ll
which the BBCPronouncing Dictionary
of British Names
of 1983 recommended (to newsreaders and presenters) to be pronounced
with an initial ordinary l-sound.
That book has over 350 names beginning with the double letter, most of
them Llan-
words.

These six words were so treated
because, as G. M. Miller, the
dictionary's original compiler put it, a BBC announcer is expected at
least to distinguish between l
and ll in
those Welsh names
in which these consonants would be differentiated by local educated
speakers of English.

At the entry for Llandaff a
second version is added giving the ll
value for the first consonant and showing the second vowel as in Taff rather than as
in the ending
of seraph.
This was followed
by the observation that "Although the first is widespread local usage,
the second is preferred by the clergy of Llandaff Cathedral and by the
BBC in Cardiff". This last remark was not surprising because
appointments to the BBC staff, if not to the clergy, have usually
in Wales been open only to those with a knowledge of Welsh which
immemorially has not been the language of the people of Cardiff.

When I was acting for the OUP as
adviser to the BBC on the
production of the first edition of that dictionary, I found that its
editor was proposing to recommend to BBC national newsreaders and
announcers the pronunciation of Newcastle-on-Tyne
with main stress on its second syllable. I urged that, though the
majority educated version in that locality was no doubt so, there was a
firmly established national preference throughout the rest of Britain
for stressing the first syllable. She accepted my point and the
dictionary was published with the local preference in second place.

I have to confess that I still find it
a bit difficult to adjust to
hearing words like Llandaff
spoken in a manner alien to the one that I grew up with as a Cardiffian
born and bred. But, if I were to be told that there is a national
preference in Wales as a whole for them to be de-anglicised, I'm not
sure that I'd have a convincing argument with which to defend my
prejudice.

I suppose there's no solution. We just
have to come to terms as best
we can with what happens. The one thing I feel strongly, though, is
that in matters of personal habits of pronunciation we should not
disparage any intelligent well-informed person's considered choices.
The BBC in particular, in my opinion, should never oblige any
well-informed broadcaster to pronounce a word in a way in which he or
she doesn't wish to say it. This, I'm afraid, is not what the BBC's
policy has always been particularly in the time of that dreadful old
bully John Reith.

Professor Wells says of the prefix Llan that it is
usually anglicised
to the ordinary English l-sound,
as in all the 15 names he gives with it. This is a realistic approach
based on observing what happens among people who have the sort of
accent which is typical of the British national newsreader rather than
on what is taken to be the local predominant educated value. The BBC
dictionary is unlikely to be right, by the way, that only the
half-dozen names quoted above fall into the category mentioned,
especially as regards Gwent and Glamorgan names.

The BBC representations in its
dictionary are particularly
unrealistic as regards the double l-sound
when it ends syllables. In such a position I've never heard any BBC
announcer not employed in Wales produce anything even beginning like
the authentic Welsh value. The Wells dictionary seems to contain only
half a dozen words in this category and treats them rather
miscellaneously. Two, penillion
and Illtud
are not shown as
ever attempted by educated British speakers with the Welsh value but
having instead respectively thl
and simple l
only. Two, Bedwellty
and Pwllheli
are shown with the
Welsh-language ll
in
secondary pronunciations only. And one, Froncysyllte, is
suggested as never
attempted other than with it! He might be right at that. Such a
spelling must look pretty intimidating to someone who knows no Welsh at
all. National news bulletins on radio and television usually cautiously
avoid specifying little known names like this anyway.

Finally, although the kind of sound
I've been discussing is unique
to Wales from a narrowly European perspective, from a world view it is
not so very rare. On the northern fringe of Europe it appears in
Icelandic. On the other side of the Atlantic it is found in Central
America and in certain languages of southwest Canada. The tl
spellings in
the names of places like the famous dormant volcano Popocatapetl seem
to reflect its
existence in Nahuatl, the language of the Aztecs. In the south of
Africa it is found in Bantu languages. Wells gives it in his
transcription of the
Zulu sound
of Hluhluwe,
the name of the
game reserve which he represents as usually attempted by English
speakers in a way that suggests the spelling "Shlushluway".

That Bantu sound is apparently a
slightly different variety from the
exact Welsh sound which never seems to be attempted as shl. Wells rightly
says [ɬ] is
sometimes imitated by the non-Welsh as the cluster thl, or even as chl (Welsh or
German value of ch).
I've often heard it attempted
also as kl
and in Tudor times
it seems to have sounded to some people like fl judging from the
name of the
comic character Fluellen (for
Llewelyn). The existence of the name Floyd is clearly a witness, if one
were needed, to the fact that Fluellen can not have been just a jokey
invention of Shakespeare's.